Writer-filmmaker Tahira Kashyap Khurrana is in the news for her new book, 7 Sins of Being a Mother, in which she’s poured her heart out about the perils and many struggles of motherhood.
In a recent Instagram live session with actor Neha Dhupia, Tahira opened up about the taboo around cesarean section delivery and why she didn’t want to hold her first newborn in her arms.
Tahira gets real about her post-delivery feelings
Video Credit: Tahira Kashyap Khurrana, Instagram
Elaborating on how she didn’t feel any maternal instincts after her first C-section delivery, Tahira said, “When the baby came out after 12 hours of intense labour, the doctor was just looking at me like, ‘Yeh lo apna bachcha (Here, take your baby).’ And I refused to open my arms. All those feelings that I had read about in the books, also heard from my mother and grandmother, all the tales of mother’s love, kuch aaya hi nahi (I didn’t feel anything). And I just didn’t want to be pretentious about it.”
Image Credit: Tahira Kashyap Khurrana, Instagram
Explaining her emotions further, she said, “So then, I had two sets of eyes staring at me. Nowadays, kids are born with open eyes, as you would know. My son and my doctor, both of them are just staring at me. And the maximum I could do was, I just wriggled my nose against his and I was like, ‘Now you can take him to his family.’ And the doctor was mortified. ‘What do you mean, his family?’ I was like, ‘Baaki ki family (The rest of the family)’.”
When Neha Dhupia forgot newborn Mehr at home ‘by mistake’
Image Credit: Neha Dhupia, Instagram
To this, Neha added her own experience from the initial phase of motherhood where she and Angad both forgot to take their daughter Mehr along with them when she was just 40 days old.
Neha recalled, “You know they say you should sit at home for 40 days so we were doing that. Literally, on the 40th night, we were waiting for the morning. We were so excited and we thought ‘let us just all go for a drive’. We went for a drive on the Sea Link and we had that two-hour window.”
While the couple was barely 45 mins away from their house, they got a call from the nurse saying, “Baby ro raha hai.”
Image Credit: Neha Dhupia, Instagram
“Both of us were like ‘we left for a drive’. And she told us ‘baby ro raha hai’. I was like ‘Aapko kaise pata? Baby humaare paas hai’. And then we looked back only to realise we forgot to take the baby on the drive. So the baby was crying at home. By mistake we left her,” Neha added.
Motherhood and baby blues go hand-in-hand, and that’s okay!
Needless to say, motherhood is one hell of a challenge! There’s no rule book on how to be the perfect mother, it’s a journey of learning and making mistakes.
The body goes through several hormonal changes during pregnancy and childbirth, and it takes a while to adjust to it—and that’s okay. Many new moms suffer from baby blues and they should never be shamed or ridiculed for it.
Lead Image Credit: Tahira Kashyap Khurrana, Instagram
